Part 6

“And Aunt Diana,” I added. “I remember now; Mr. Mokes gives a chowder dinner to-day over on the North Beach.”

“I would not give much for chowder made by a Mokes,” said John, with the scorn of an old camper-out in his voice.

“Oh, Mokes does not make it, Mr. Hoffman. What are you thinking of? Mokes make chowder! By no means. He has his servant and the boatmen to do all the work, and sends over his wines and ice beforehand. It will be an elegant dinner, I assure you.”

“On the beach?”

“Yes, on the beach. Unfortunately, tables can not be transported, unless, indeed, Dundreary should arrive with his ‘waft.’ But the table-cloth will be damask, with a monogram worked in gold thread, and the conversation will be strictly Fifth Avenueish, I will answer for that.”

“Great is the power of youthful beauty,” I said, when we had reached our room again. “Here is Mokes with his money and wines, the Professor with his learning and bones, the Captain with his beauty and buttons, all three apparently revolving around that giddy little cousin of mine. And now comes John Hoffman!”

“With all his ancestors behind him! Has he taken her to the demi-lune yet?” said Sara, opening the _Princess of Thule_, which she read after a dose of Florida history, like sugar after a pill. “Do you know, Martha, I think poor Lavender is rather unfairly treated by the author of this book. He is ordered about by Ingram, and most unmercifully snubbed by Sheila, who, after all, manages to have her own way, ‘whatever.’”

Now I had thrown John Hoffman purposely into my list of Iris’s admirers in order to provoke something like a denial from Sara--these two seemed to feel such a singular kind of interested dislike toward each other; but my little bait caught nothing; Sara remained impassive.

Toward sunset the same evening we waited on the Plaza in company with the entire population of the town for the distribution of the one mail, accomplished with some difficulty by the efficient, active, Northern postmaster, in consequence of the windows being darkened with flattened noses, and the doorways blocked up, to say nothing of beatings on the walls, impatient calls through the key-hole, and raids round the back way by the waiting populace. Having wrestled manfully for our letters, we all strolled down Tolomato Street, reading as we went. Iris journeyed languidly through the sand; she had received no letters, and she had Mokes on her hands, Mokes radiant with the rejection of his private three-cornered chowder party, and the smiles she herself had bestowed upon him over on that wicked North Beach. “Oh, for a horse!” she sighed. “Nay, I would even ride in a Florida cart.”

Aunt Diana was weary, but jubilant; she had the Professor and the Trojan war, and did her duty by them. Miss Sharp ambled along on the other side, and said “Indeed!” at intervals. Sara read her letters with a dreary sort of interest; her letters were always from “Ed.,” she used to say. John and I, strolling in advance, carried on a good, comfortable, political fight over our newspapers.

“Another cemetery,” said Sara, as the white crosses and head-stones shone out in the sunset on one side of the road.

Mokes, stimulated to unusual conversational efforts by the successes of the day, now brought forward the omnipresent item. “This is--er, I suppose, the old Huguenot burying-ground, a--er--a spot of much interest, I am told.”

“Yes,” replied Sara. “This is the very spot, Mr. Mokes.”

“Oh no, Miss St. John,” said Aunt Diana, coming to the rescue, “you mistake. This is Tolomato.”

“It makes no difference. I am now convinced that they are _all_ Huguenot burying-grounds,” replied Sara, calmly.

The little cemetery was crowded with graves, mounds of sand over which the grass would not grow, and heavy coquina tombs whose inscriptions had crumbled away. The names on the low crosses, nearly all Spanish, Minorcan, Corsican, and Greek, bore witness to the foreign ancestry of the majority of the population. We found Alvarez, La Suarez, Leonardi, Capo, Carrarus, Ximanies, Baya, Pomar, Rogero, and Hernandez. Among the Christian names were Bartolo, Raimauld, Rafaelo, Geronimo, Celestino, Dolorez, Dominga, Paula, and Anaclata.

“It looks venerable, but it only dates back about one hundred years,” said John. “Where the old Dons of two or three centuries ago buried their dead, no one knows; perhaps they sent them all back home, Chinese fashion. An old bell which now hangs in the cathedral is said to have come from here; it bears the inscription, ‘Sancte Joseph, ora pro nobis; D. 1682,’ and is probably the oldest bell in the country.”

“And what was it doing here?” said Mokes, with the air of a historian.

“There was once an Indian village here, called Tolomato, and a mission chapel; the bell is supposed to have come from the chapel.”

“Is that the chapel?” asked Mokes, pointing to a small building on the far side of the cemetery. He was getting on famously, he thought, quite historical, and that sort of thing.

“No; that is a chapel erected in 1853 by Cubans to the memory of Father Varela. The old Tolomato chapel was--was destroyed.”

“How?” inquired Mokes.

John glanced toward Sara with a smile. “Oh, go on,” she said, “I am quite prepared! A massacre, of course!”

“Yes, a massacre. The Indians stole into the chapel by night, and finding Father Corpa engaged in his evening devotions, they slew him at the altar, and threw his body out into the forest, where it could never afterward be found. The present cemetery marks the site of the old mission, and bears its name.”

Mokes, having covered himself with glory, now led the way out, and the party turned homeward. Sara and I lingered to read the Latin inscription over the chapel door, “Beati mortui qui in Domino moriuntur.” John beckoned us toward a shadowed corner where stood a lonely tomb, the horizontal slab across the top bearing no date, and only the initials of a name, “Here lies T----F----.”

“Poor fellow!” said John, “he died by his own hand, alone, at night, on this very spot: a young Frenchman, I was told, but I know nothing more.”

“Is not that enough?” I said. “There is a whole history in those words.”

“There was once a railing separating this tomb from the other graves, as something to be avoided and feared,” said John; “but time, or perhaps the kind hand of charity, has removed the barrier: charity that can pity the despairing, suffering, human creature whose only hope came to this--to die!”

Happening to glance at Sara, I saw her eyes full of tears, and in spite of her effort to keep them back, two great drops rolled down and fell on the dark slab; John saw them, and turned away instantly.

“Why, Sara!” I said, moved almost to tears myself by sudden sympathy.

“Don’t say any thing, please,” answered Sara. “There, it is all over.”

We walked away, and found John standing before a little wooden cross that had once marked a grave; there was no trace of a grave left, only green grass growing over the level ground, while lichen and moss had crept over the rough unpainted wood and effaced the old inscription. A single rose-bush grew behind, planted probably a little slip when the memory of the lost one was green and fresh with tears; now, a wild neglected bush, it waved its green branches and shed its roses year by year over the little cross that stood, veiled in moss, alone, where now no grave remained, as though it said, “He is not here: he is risen.”

“Look,” said John. “Does it not tell its story? Why should we be saddened while we have what that cross typifies?”

That evening, happening to take up Sara’s Bible, I found pinned in on the blank leaf these old verses:

“There is a calm for those who weep, A rest for weary pilgrims found; They softly lie and sweetly sleep Low in the ground.

“The storm that wracks the wintry sky No more disturbs their deep repose Than summer evening’s latest sigh That shuts the rose.

“I long to lay this painful head And aching heart beneath the soil, To slumber in that dreamless bed From all my toil.”

“Poor child!” I said to myself--“poor child!”

“Who do you think is here, Niece Martha?” said Aunt Diana one morning a week later. “Eugenio; he came last night.”

“What, the poet?”

“Yes; he will stay several days, and I can introduce him to all of you,” said Aunt Di, graciously.

“I shall be very glad, not only on my own account, but on Sara’s also, aunt.”

“Oh, Eugenio will not feel any interest in a person like Miss St. John, Niece Martha! He belongs to another literary world entirely.”

“I know that; but may not Sara attain to that other world in time? I hope much from her.”

“Then you will be disappointed, Niece Martha. I am not literary myself, but I have always noticed that those writers whose friends are always ‘hoping much’ never amount to much; it is the writer who takes his friends and the world by surprise who has the genius.”

There was a substratum of hard common-sense in Aunt Diana, where my romantic boat often got aground. It was aground now.

The next morning Eugenio presented himself without waiting for Aunt Di, and John proposed a walk to the Ponce de Leon Spring in his honor.

“It is almost the only spot you have not visited,” he said to us, “and Eugenio must see the sweep of a pine-barren.”

“By all means,” replied the poet, “the stretching glades and far savannas, gemmed with the Southern wild flowers.”

“You have missed the most beautiful flower of all,” said Iris, “‘the wild sweet princess of far Florida, the yellow jasmine.’”

The Captain was with us, likewise Mokes; but Aunt Diana had sliced in another young lady to keep the balance even; and away we went through the town, across the Maria Sanchez Creek, under the tree arches, and out on to the broad causeway beyond.

“What! _walk_ to Ponce de Leon Spring!” exclaimed the languid St. Augustine ladies as we passed.

“They evidently look upon Northerners as a species of walking madmen,” I said, laughing.

“It is a singular fact,” commented Sara, “that country people never walk if they can help it; they go about their little town and that is all. City people, on the contrary, walk their miles daily as a matter of course. You can almost tell whether a young lady is city or country bred from the mere fact of her walking or not walking.”

“Climate here has something to do with it,” said John, “and also the old Spanish ideas that ladies should wear satin slippers and take as few steps as possible. The Minorcans keep up some of the old ideas still. Courtship is carried on through a window, the maiden within, a rose in her hair, and the favorite Spanish work in her hand, and the lover outside leaning on the casement. Not until a formal acceptance has been given is he allowed to enter the house and rest himself and his aspirations in a chair.”

“We have adopted English ideas of exercise in New York,” said Eugenio, “but they have not penetrated far into the interior as yet, and are utterly unknown south of Mason and Dixon’s line. St. Augustine, however, is still Spanish, and no one expects the traditional Spanish señorita, with her delicate slippers, fan, and mantilla, to start out for a six-mile constitutional--it would not be her style at all. By-the-way, I saw a beautiful Spanish face leaning from a window on St. George Street this morning.”

“Yes,” said Mokes, consequentially. “There are two on St. George Street, two on Charlotte, and one on St. Hypolita. I have taken pains to trace--er--to trace them out; they like it--er--and I have, I may say, some experience in outlines and that sort of thing--galleries abroad--old masters, etc. Paint a little myself.”

“Indeed!” said Eugenio. “Original designs, I suppose?”

Oh no; Mokes left that to the regular profession. They had to do it, poor fellows--wouldn’t interfere with them.

“Very generous,” said Eugenio.

Yes, Mokes thought it was. But gentlemen of--of fortune, you know, had their duties--as--as such.

“How _much_ I should like to see your pictures, Mr. Mokes!” said the poet, assuming an air of deep interest.

The highly flattered Mokes thought that “perhaps--er,” he “might have one or two sent down by express;” he always liked “to oblige his friends.”

“Don’t chaff him any more,” whispered John, with a meaning glance toward Iris.

“What! not that lovely girl!” exclaimed Eugenio, under his breath.

“Two or three millions!” said John.

“Ah!” replied the poet.

On the red bridge Sara paused a moment and stood gazing down the river. “What a misty look there is away down there over the salt marshes!” she said, “the boats tipped up on shore, with their slender masts against the sky. The river is certainly going down to the sea, and yet the sea-breeze comes from behind me.”

“The Sebastian is nearer the ocean up here than it is down at its mouth,” said John. “Look across: there is only the North Beach between us here and the ocean.”

“Between us and Africa, you mean.”

“What is it that attracts you toward Africa, Miss St. John?” asked Eugenio.

“Antony,” replied Sara, promptly. “Don’t you remember those wonderful lines written by an Ohio soldier,

“‘I am dying, Egypt, dying; Ebbs the crimson life-tide fast?’”

“Dear me, Miss St. John, I hope you are not taking up _Antony and Cleopatra_ to the detriment of the time-honored _Romeo and Juliet_! Romeo is the orthodox lover, pray remember.”

“But I am heterodox,” replied Sara, smiling.

Beyond the river the road led through the deep white sand of Florida. Iris’s little boots sank ankle deep.

“Take my arm,” said the Captain.

Now taking the arm means more or less, according to the arm and the way it is offered. The Captain was tall, the Captain was strong, and he had a way with him. Iris was small, Iris was graceful, and she had a way with her. To say that from that moment they flirted boundlessly all the afternoon does not express it. I am sorry to say, also, that John and the poet openly, and Sara and I tacitly, egged them on. The bullion star of Mokes had been in the ascendant long enough, we thought. The Professor had a staff, a trowel, and a large basket for specimens. He made forays into the thicket, lost himself regularly, and Miss Sharp as regularly went to the rescue and guided him back.

“How many old tracks there are turning off to the right and the left!” I said. “Where do they go?”

“The most delightful roads are those that go nowhere,” said Eugenio, “roads that go out and haze around in the woods just for fun. Who wants to be always going somewhere?”

“These roads will answer your purpose, then,” said John. “Most of them go nowhere. They did go out to old military posts once upon a time, in the Seminole war, but the military posts have disappeared, and now they go nowhere. They are pretty tracks, some of them, especially the old Indian entrance to St. Augustine--a trail coming up from the south.”

Turning to the right, we passed through a little nook of verdure, leaving the sand behind us. “This,” said John, “is a hamak; and if I have a pet grievance, it is the general use of the word ‘hummock’ in its place. ‘Hummock’ is an arctic word, meaning to pile up ice; but ‘hamak’ is pure Carib or Appalachian, and signifies a resting or abiding place, a small Indian farm. There is another kind of soil in Florida which has the singular name of ‘sobbed land.’ This has a rocky substratum, impervious to water, four feet below the surface, which holds the rain-falls as though it--”

“Devoured its own tears,” suggested Eugenio. “But where are your flowers, good people? Is not this the land of flowers?”

“No,” said John; “that is another mistake. The Spaniards happened to land here during the Easter season, which they call Pascua Florida, the flowery Passover, on account of the palms with which their churches are decorated at that time; and so they named the country from the festival, and not from the flowers at all. There is not one word said about flowers in all their voluminous old records--”

“Don’t be statistical, I beg,” interrupted Eugenio. “And are there no flowers, then?”

“Oh yes,” answered Sara, “little wee blossoms in delicate colors starring over the ground, besides violets and gold-cups; these are the yeomanry. The Cherokee roses, the yellow jasmine, and the Spanish-bayonets, with their sceptres of white blossoms, are the nobility.”

Presently we came out upon the barren, with its single feathery trees, its broad sky-sweep, its clear-water ponds, an endless stretch of desert which was yet no desert, but green and fair. The saw-palmetto grew in patches, and rustled its stiff leaves as we passed.

“I can’t think of any thing but Spanish ladies looking out between the sticks of their fans,” remarked Eugenio.

“That’s just like it,” said Iris, and plucking one of the fan-shaped leaves, she gave the idea a lovely coquettish reality. The Captain murmured something (he had a way of murmuring). What it was we could not hear, but then Iris heard, and blushed very prettily. Mokes took the “other young lady,” the sliced one, and walked on loftily. She went. The truth is, they generally go with three millions.

“There is something about the barrens that always gives me the feeling of being far away,” said Sara.

“The old attraction,” replied Eugenio. “‘Over the hills and far away’ is the dream of all imaginative souls. Do you remember

“‘Afar in the desert I love to ride, With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side?’”

“‘There is a happy land, Far, far away,’”

I sang.

“Yes, that is it,” said John, “and even our old friend ‘Swannee Ribber’ owes his dominion to the fact that he is ‘far, far away.’”

A little trail turned off to a low cabin on the bank of a brook; we saw some flowers, and wandered that way for a moment. It was the lonely little home of a freedman, and two children stood in the doorway staring at us with solemn eyes. We bestowed some pennies, which produced a bob of a courtesy; then some jokes, which brought out the ivories.

“What are your names, children?” I asked.

“They’s jes Lou-ee-zy and Low-ii-zy,” replied a voice from within-doors. “They’s twins, and I’s took car’ ob dein allays.”

It was a crippled old auntie who spoke. She told us her story, with long digressions about “ole massa” and “ole miss.”

“After all, I suspect you were more comfortable in the old times, auntie,” I said.

“What’s dat to do wid de acquisition ob freedom?” replied the old woman, proudly. “De great ting is dis yer: Lou-ee-zy is free, and Low-ii-zy is free! Bot’ ob dem! Bot’ ob dem, ladies!”

“I have never been able to make them confess that they were more comfortable in the old days, no matter how poor and desolate they may be,” I said.

“The divine spark in every breast,” replied Eugenio. “But where is the spring, Hoffman? I like your barren; it smacks of the outlaw and bold buccaneer, after the trim wheat fields of the North, and there is a grand sweep of sky overhead. Nevertheless, I own to being thirsty.”

“It is not ordinary thirst,” replied John; “it is the old yearning which Ponce de Leon always felt when he had come as far as this.”

“He came this way, then, did he?”

“Invariably.”

“If I had been here at the time I should have said, ‘Ponce’ (of course we should have been intimate enough to call each other by our first names)--‘Ponce, my good friend, have your spring a little nearer while you are magically about it!’” And taking off his straw hat the poet wiped his white forehead, and looked at us with a quizzical expression in his brilliant eyes.

“It _is_ warm,” confessed Aunt Diana, who, weary and worried, was toiling along almost in silence. Mokes was nearly out of sight with the “other young lady;” Iris and the Captain were absorbed in that murmured conversation so hopeless to outsiders; and Spartan matron though she was, she had not the courage to climb around after the Professor in cloth boots that drew like a magnet the vicious cacti of the thicket. Miss Sharp had leather boots, and climbed valiantly.

At last we came to the place, and filed in through a broken-down fence. We found a deserted house, an overgrown field, a gully, a pool, and an old curb of coquina surrounding the magic spring.

“I wonder if any one was ever massacred here?” observed Sara, looking around.

“The Fountain of Youth,” declaimed John, ladling out the water. “Who will drink? Centuries ago the Indians of Cuba came to these shores to seek the waters of immortality, and as they never returned, they are supposed to be still here somewhere enjoying a continued cherubic existence. Father Martyn himself affirms in his letter to the Pope that there is a spring here the water thereof being drunk straightway maketh the old young again. Ladies and gentlemen, the original and only Ponce de Leon Spring! Who will drink?”

We all drank; and then there was a great silence.

“Well,” said the poet, deliberately, looking around from his seat on the curb, “take it altogether, that shanty, those bushes, the pig-sty, the hopeless sandy field, the oozing pool, and this horrible tepid water, drawn from, to say the least, a dubious source--a very dubious source--it is, all in all, _about_ the ugliest place I ever saw!”

There was a general shout.

“We have suspected it in our hearts all winter,” said the “other young lady;” “but not one of us dared put the thought into words, as it was our only walk.”

The poet staid with us a day or two longer, and charmed us all with his delightful, winsome humor.

“Do you know, I really love that man,” I announced.

“So do I,” said Iris.

“That is nothing,” said John; “he is ‘the poet whom poets love,’ you know.”

“But we are not poets, Mr. Hoffman.”

“We are only plebes, and plebes may very well love what poets love, I think.”

“But it does not always follow,” I said.

“By no means. In this case, however, it is true. All love Eugenio, both poets and plebes.”

“He is the Mendelssohn of poets,” I said; “and, besides that, he is the only person I ever met who reminded me of my idea of Mendelssohn personally--an idea gathered from those charming ‘letters’ and the _Auchester_ book.”

The next evening Eugenio and Sara went off for a stroll on the sea-wall; two hours later Sara came back to our room, laid a blank book on the table, and threw herself into a chair.

“Tired?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“It is a lovely evening.”

“Yes.”

“Did you have a pleasant time?”

“Yes.”

I knew that blank book well; it contained all Sara’s printed stories and verses; my eyes glanced toward it.

“Yes,” said Sara; “there it is! I gave it to him yesterday. I knew he would read it through, and I knew also that I could read his real opinion in those honest eyes of his.”

“Well?”

“There isn’t a thing in it worth the paper it is written on.”

“Oh, Sara!”

“And what is more, I have known it myself all along.”

“Is it possible he said so?”

“He? Never. He said every thing that was generous and kind and cordial and appreciative; and he gave me solid assistance, too, in the way of advice, and suggestive hints worth their weight in gold to an isolated beginner like myself. But--”

“But?”

“Yes, ‘but.’ Through it all, Martha, I could see the truth written in the sky over that old look-out tower; we were on the glacis under that tower all the time, and I never took my eyes off from it. That tower is my fate, I feel sure.”

“What do you mean? Your fate?”

“I don’t know exactly myself. But, nevertheless, in some way or other that look-out tower is connected with my fate--the fate of poor Sara St. John.”

In John Hoffman’s room at the same time another conversation was going on.

JOHN. “Has she genius, do you think?”

EUGENIO. “Not an iota.”

JOHN. “What do you mean, you iron-hearted despot? Has the girl no poetry in her?”